“Thanks for doing this, by the way,” I said. “It’s really important. They’ll raise a lot of money. Some of which they’ve promised will actually get to us. We’re figuring on a new furnace because of you, and maybe another aide for the kids.”
“It’s just strange that it’s a Saturday night. No one gives a charity dinner on a Saturday night.”
I shook my head. “Do you know why it’s on a Saturday night? Because they were told that because of your schedule you could only do it on a Saturday night.”
“Hmm. I probably should have known that, shouldn’t I?”
“I’m wearing black,” I said as the elevator doors closed.
EVERYONE WAS WEARING black, except for a few adventurous souls who had decided to hell with convention and were wearing black and white, and the older women, who still dwelled in the land of lavender and teal. The reception area outside the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf was choked with guests for the annual dinner of a group called Manhattan Mothers Guild. Manhattan Mothers is made up of socialites who raise money for poor women and children by hosting lunches, dinners, even breakfasts. The event programs are rather unvarying. There is a video that is usually long on shots of cute black kids with enormous dark eyes. There is a testimonial, from either a former foster kid who has gone on to Harvard Law School or a woman who was beaten bloody by her boyfriend and now counsels others in the same spot. And there is an honoree, chosen because of fame, fortune, and the ability to fill a couple of $100,000 tables. There is fierce competition for honorees; the CEOs of various corporations every week turn down three or four invitations to be cited for their commitment to a better life for all New Yorkers (or for all New York children, or schools, or landmarks, or parks).
In the world of fund-raising events, honoring Meghan Fitzmaurice, who has anchored Rise and Shine for the past ten years, is the ultimate double threat, publicity and philanthropy both. Coverage in the newspapers, perhaps the local affiliate of the network, a brace of tables, a crowd drawn by the opportunity to hear and see her. She does not disappoint. Unlike some other honorees, Meghan always shows up sober. She always looks good. She always speaks well. She is always cordial to those who approach her table, even the young television reporters who say they have been watching her since they were in elementary school, which makes her feel a hundred years old.
We were raised with good manners, first by the housekeeper, then by our aunt. We let them down only when we are alone.
I rarely go to events like this. Meghan doesn’t ask me. She doesn’t even ask Evan, her husband, unless the event is particularly high profile or she suspects that there will be lots of other investment bankers and that he can therefore turn it into a business opportunity. Once, years ago, Evan, Alex Menninger, and Tom Bradley got pleasantly drunk at a dinner party and created what they called the Denis Thatcher Society, an organization of men married to powerful public women. Any time the Denis Thatcher Society is mentioned, all the men roar with laughter and all the women get very still, their faces flat.
Occasionally Meghan brings Leo to one of these events as her date. In this way her son has met the president of Ireland, two presidents of the United States, a couple of Supreme Court justices, and that guitar player who organizes all the big relief rock concerts and is now a lord. “Today it’s boring,” Meghan said once when Leo groused in the car on the way to the hotel. “Tomorrow it’s history. Think of the stories you’ll have to tell your kids.”
“I’m not having kids,” Leo always says.
“You’ll change your mind,” Meghan always says.
I arrived too early and circulated busily with a glass of wine in my hand, looking as though I was looking for someone when I was merely trying not to look like someone who knew no one. The wife of one of Evan’s partners was doing the same, and she seemed overjoyed to see me although we’d met in a perfunctory way only once before. She talked for ten minutes about their newborn twins, a conversation that seemed to take place underwater in slow motion. Baby nurse, teak crib, glub, glub. She drifted off and was replaced by Meghan’s associate producer, the one she had been threatening to fire during our Saturday morning Central Park runs for at least three months. I could tell he hadn’t gotten my name because twice he referred to my sister as “the queen of all media.”
“You,” came a throaty voice from behind me, and I turned to Ann Jensen, who was the chair of the event. “You. You. You.”
“Yes,” I said.
“You are my hero. Or heroine. Do you mind which? Because whichever it is, you are it. All day I have been saying, Bridget Fitzmaurice is my hero. Or heroine.”
“It was nothing. Really. I was happy to do it.”
“Nothing? Four hundred and thirty additional guests is nothing? Last year we made a million dollars at this dinner. This year it will be one point six million. That…is…not…nothing.”
Manhattan Mothers had given the women’s shelter program where I work a good-size grant the year before. In exchange I had delivered Meghan for this year’s dinner. I was a hero. Or a heroine.
“And let me tell you something about your sister,” Ann Jensen said, leaning in more closely so that I could look directly into her eyes, which had the preternatural stare of someone who has had lower and upper lifts. People always feel the need to tell me something about my sister, as though we don’t know each other well. “Oh, I could tell you a few things, honey,” I was tempted to reply, but instead I looked rapt. I tried not to look down. Ann Jensen had on a strapless gown, and she had the kind of cleavage about which Irving likes to say, “You could park a bicycle in there.”
She held on to my hands insistently. “No demands,” Ann continued. “Do you know how rare that is? No demands. We had someone several years ago—I can’t even tell you. A certain size car, a helicopter from the country house. And then they wouldn’t even come for dinner. In at nine-oh-five for the award, out by nine-thirty. Your sister is not only coming for the meal, she is coming for cocktails.”
“And staying for dessert and dancing,” I said.
“What did I say? No demands.” It’s an odd thing about irony in New York; either you find yourself in situations where it is the only language spoken or those in which it falls on utterly deaf ears. Ann probably spoke French for shopping in Paris and pidgin Spanish to give instructions to the housekeeper. She did not speak ironic. “My hero,” she said as she was led away by a woman with a clipboard and I began my aimless circulating again.
My sister came in at seven. Usually I can tell because the cameras start to go off with a sound like a swarm of insects. It was easier this time because she was wearing a white dress. Meghan never wears underwear under her evening wear. I suppose Evan and I are the only ones who know that. Or maybe everyone knows it. The dress she was wearing that night followed the lines of her body perfectly. It looked like a very simple white halter dress until you realized that it was covered with tiny round shiny things. “Those things,” she’d said that morning at breakfast. “You know. They’re not sequins. Damn. You know.”
“I have no clue.” I still had no clue, but they looked wonderful. The dress looked like water, which seemed apt. Meghan has the body of a swimmer, long strong muscles, broad shoulders, slim hips. Every day after the show she takes off the makeup, calls me, has a cup of coffee, goes to the gym, and swims for thirty minutes. She says it’s the only time she can really be alone.
“She’s much better looking in person,” someone behind me said.
“She has to have had work done,” said another.
She hasn’t.
Evan was next to her, his hand at the small of her back. Evan and Meghan met when they were children, he eight, she six. We lived in the nicest section of Montrose then, and so did he. They were at a birthday party together. Legend has it that he said she had spots on her face. “I have freckles,” she said with the dignity she had even as a kid. “They look like spots,” he replied. She pushed him in the pool. I have heard the story so many t
imes that I can see it all in my mind’s eye. Evan is wearing a polo shirt that’s buttoned too high on his thin stalk of a neck. Meghan’s knees are knobs, her legs skinny, her hem drooping because our mother was so careless with our clothes, insisting they be so expensive that they needed dry cleaning or ironing, then ignoring whether they were cleaned or ironed. He is speaking out of self-protection because she is so sure of herself; she responds out of outrage at being made to look foolish. Of course I have no way of recalling any of this; I was two years old at the time and was probably at home in a playpen watching the housekeeper wash dishes, which apparently was one of the ways I whiled away my toddler days. I’ve been told too many times to count that Meghan called Evan “Stupid Head” as he flailed in the deep end, and that he was led away, dripping and dazzled.
I’m sure Evan had never encountered anyone like Meghan before. Evan’s parents are the quietest people on earth. When she’s feeling froggy, his mother will say, “Oh, you,” to her husband, and he’ll squeeze her forearm. That’s the equivalent of all hell breaking loose in the Grater household. I sat with Evan’s mother at their wedding lunch, and I remember how her eyes filled and shone as she watched the two of them move around the dance floor. Evan had taken ballroom dancing lessons as a surprise for Meghan, and he was guiding her firmly through the turns and twirls. “He’s beside himself,” his mother had said.
It’s a variation of that dance when Evan steers Meghan through crowds like the one at the Waldorf dinner. She never really has to move at all, never has to thread her way like I do through the waiters’ trays and the glasses held high and the eyes wandering away to someone more interesting or important. Like a spot in the cosmos, she becomes that area around which all matter begins to circle. The chair of the event. The vice chair. The woman whose son was in Leo’s class at the Biltmore School before Leo went away to boarding school (the kid who beat Leo bloody in fifth grade). The woman who is married to one of Evan’s partners (and who once tried to seduce Evan in a powder room during a party). The president of the network.
Somehow my boss, Alison Baker, the executive director of Women On Women, has wound up at Meghan’s side. She leans in to whisper in my sister’s ear, and the gracious, slightly frozen smile that Meghan has been wearing and that fits as perfectly as the dress widens into something authentic and wicked, and over the camera click-click I hear the guttural and very loud sound that is Meghan’s real laugh. Once a men’s magazine said it was the sexiest thing about her.
The Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf looks like the throne room of some small second-rate monarchy, Liechtenstein, maybe, or Monaco. The hotel knows its market, and the lighting is soft and pink and designed to shave ten years off your age. It takes forever to make your way through the tables, which are arranged even more tightly than the guests arranged themselves during the cocktail hour. Ann Jensen was right; the evening’s take would be enormous. I looked inside my little calligraphed seating card, but I knew my table number. I was at table 1. Meghan is always at table 1.
“Thank God it’s you, Bridge,” Evan said as he slipped into his seat next to mine, Meghan trailing behind with the network president. “I thought I was going to have to talk to one of those women all night. You know what I mean.”
“Where were you this morning? We had breakfast at your house.”
“Working.”
“Have you talked to Leo?”
“I keep missing the chance because of the time difference between here and Spain. I get ready to call and then I realize it’s the middle of the night. Knowing Leo, he’s probably out and about in the middle of the night, even in Spain, but I don’t want to take the chance I’ll wake the guy up. Meghan talked to him after you left, I think. I think that’s what she said.”
“I’m so, so honored,” said Ann Jensen as she came up behind him, and I grabbed his left hand and squeezed as he grimaced down at the gold-rimmed dinner plate and then pivoted deftly, breaking into his company grin. “I’m such a fan of your wife’s,” she added. Now there’s the kind of thing a guy loves to hear.
Meghan was across the table from me, an explosive spray of flowers between us, so that I could see only the top of her head. She never changes her hair for these events, or for the camera. It waves around her face. In her last contract, the network offered her her own makeup person, but Meghan said it wasn’t necessary. The women in the makeup room don’t forget that. When the circles under her eyes are darkest, they are there during commercial breaks with concealer and powder. One of them comes to the apartment and does her hair and makeup for evenings like this one. Her copper-colored hair shines in the light from the ballroom chandeliers. Her freckles shine through her makeup by design. She is forty-seven and looks thirty.
It would have been rude for me to monopolize Evan, but luckily on my other side was a pleasant older man with a handsome head of silver hair, a ruddy complexion, and blue eyes that smiled when he did, which is quite rare in New York. Meghan has frequently remarked that this is how our father would have looked had he had an opportunity to age gracefully, which is apparently how he did most things. At least according to Meghan. When she speaks of our parents, it is in breezy set pieces, as though they are people about whom she once did a story. Their death together in a car on a Connecticut curve merely seems like the obligatory coda. If the intention was to make me scarcely believe in them, it has worked. “No one knew him well beyond the obvious,” our aunt Maureen had once said tartly of our father. “Nice looks, nice voice, nice manners.” This stranger at my elbow seems much more real to me than the idea of John J. Fitzmaurice, a man whose reality was apparently so tenuous that he managed to join the Yale Club although, as we discovered some years later, he had never actually gone to Yale.
My dinner partner had just returned from climbing Machu Picchu and was discursive without being a bore about it. He spoke about the sense of peace he felt after the difficult climb. “Almost makes you believe in God,” he said.
I told him about a pilot program we were doing at Women On Women, to have the women who were living in our shelters act as aides in our preschool so that they could use what they learned to raise their own kids. Talking to people at dinners like this is a win-win proposition for someone in my line of work. A year ago I piqued the interest of an older man at a dinner party in some weird old loft building on a dirty block by the Hudson River; inside was ten thousand square feet of apartment, much of it made over into a facsimile of an English manor house, with a dining room large enough to seat forty-three. The man, whose name was Edward Prevaricator—and who spent five minutes convincing me it truly was his name, eventually showing me his platinum Amex as proof—was one of those rare New York men who ask after your work and then listen when you respond. He was the only dinner partner I’d ever had with an encyclopedic knowledge of early childhood education, and he told me a charming story about reading The Cat in the Hat to a grandchild who would move her lips because she’d memorized the book. He’d also had the most memorable blue eyes I’d ever seen, like those eucalyptus mints that taste like Vicks VapoRub and remind me of the illnesses of my childhood. When I mentioned his eyes, Edward Prevaricator had replied, “They are my one grace note.” It was as though he was a character from a Victorian novel brought to life, one of the good ones, the ones who liberate an orphan secretly and watch him prosper from afar. In some sense he was exactly that, for the following week he sent WOW a check for $100,000, the largest unsolicited gift we had ever received.
“You smoke the pole?” asked Tequila, our receptionist, when the check arrived in the morning mail. Tequila thinks everything is about sex or money, and often about the two together.
“He didn’t even make a pass. I didn’t even know he was rich,” I said. “I swear.”
Alison looked hard at the check. “Can this really be this guy’s actual name?”
“Let’s wait and see if the check clears.”
“Do you know a man named Edward Prevaricator?” I asked the man now
sitting at my left, who was trying not to stare at my sister across the flowers.
“Here tonight, I think,” the man replied. “He’s a very philanthropic character. From Kansas City, I think, or Chicago. One of those midwest places. Very successful business.” He had lapsed into Manhattan shorthand. It’s as though the city is too busy for verbs or transitions.
At the other side of the table, I heard Meghan thanking one of the event chairs for holding the dinner on a Saturday night so that she could attend. She does a lot of work at events like this. She has always felt the need to do more than a single thing at once: the mail while on the phone, the newspapers on the treadmill. No matter how tedious the company, she interviews her dinner partners, and frequently finishes coffee with at least one idea for a story, on monetary policy or public health or Asian-American relations. This is disappointing only for the wives of the men who are seated next to her, who ask what they talked about, what she told them, what she was like. “She seemed interested in my work,” the husbands say, and the wives sigh or snort, depending on their dispositions and how long they’ve been married.
As the waitstaff was clearing the entrée course, I ducked to the back of the ballroom to the Women On Women table. All around the vast rococo space you could hear the hum of dinner conversation interspersed with the sharp impatient accented exclamations of the Waldorf waiters: Excuse me! Excuse me please! Meghan once did a story on why the Waldorf had no women waiters. Now there were a few women waiters among the men, wearing the same tuxedos, fetching the same vegetable plates for the vegetarians and the decaf for the older guests.
At good-conscience dinners, representatives from the various charities are seated at the tables so far back in the ballroom that the people with money would go nuts about the placement if they were at those tables themselves. It’s insulting largesse, but largesse nonetheless. The people seated at these tables are the only ones who praise the ballroom food. WOW had two tables, and because of Meghan we would get a nice chunk of the evening’s proceeds. We run a shelter for homeless women, a job training program for the women in the shelter, and an early childhood program for their kids, along with a little covert drug rehab that we prefer not to discuss with donors. Half of our staff was at table 82, so far in the back that six more feet and they would have been sitting in the foyer. Tequila was wrapping dinner rolls in her napkin and putting them into a shopping bag beneath the table.
Rise and Shine Page 2
